Baez, the last man in the bullpen, and Valdez, who played the first 18 innings at second base, were two of the biggest reasons the Phillies beat the Cincinnati Reds, 5-4, in a 19-inning marathon on that night.
In one of the most entertaining games of the year, Baez, who seemed to be on the verge of being released all season—he actually was let go in July—came out of the bullpen in the 14th inning and pitched five innings of one-hit, shutout ball before Valdez took over and earned the win with a scoreless 19th inning.
Baez threw 73 the pitches, the most since he was a starter with Cleveland in 2002. He had no choice. The Phils were out of pitchers.
“Great job by Baez,” starter Roy Halladay said. “The guy’s a great teammate. He sucked it up for us.”
Valdez hadn’t pitched since his sandlot days in the Dominican Republic. The super-sub infielder had always impressed scouts with his whip-like arm.
“Now, we get to see how hard he throws,” one team official said to another in the club’s executive suite.
Valdez hit 89 mph on the team’s radar gun. That’s about an average major-league fastball.
Pitching Coach Rich Dubee had told Valdez in the 16th inning that he might have to pitch, so he wasn’t surprised to get the call. His family, however, was. His wife was sleeping at home in New Mexico when her mother phoned her and said, “Wilson is pitching!” Kamie Valdez sprung from bed and turned on the TV just in time to see her husband strut off the mound like he’d been there before. A game-winning sacrifice fly from Raul Ibanez in the bottom of the 19th made Valdez the first player since Babe Ruth in 1921 to get the pitching victory after starting the game as a position player.
“It was one of my most fun games ever,” said Valdez, who oozes appreciation for being a major-leaguer after bouncing through 10 different organizations over 15 years.
Valdez wasn’t the only one who had a lot of fun. The game started with a sellout crowd in the seats, but ended with just a smattering of fans in the house at 1 :20 A.M. The fans loved every minute of the late-night/early-morning drama, though one of them was guilty of not paying complete attention. In the 17th inning, as Baez—the Phillies’ seventh and final reliever—was starting to tire, a fan leaned over the railing and offered Bullpen Coach Mick Billmeyer some advice.
“The guy said, ‘Hey, get somebody up!’” Billmeyer recounted. “So I stood up.”
“That was a tough way to lose a game,” Manager Charlie Manuel said afterward.
Halladay spoke softly, blandly after that game in Miami. It was difficult to tell whether he was more frustrated with himself, the defense, or the lack of offense. But deep down inside, it had to be comforting for the pitcher to know that, across the state in Clearwater, second baseman Chase Utley was about to play in his first minor-league rehabilitation game after missing the start of the season with the most famous case of right knee tendinitis in Philadelphia history. Halladay had once called Utley “the driving force” of the Phillies and compared him to Derek Jeter, the heart of the most recent New York Yankees dynasty. With Utley now playing in minor-league games, it wouldn’t be long before his bat and intensity would be back in the lineup.
“One person can mean a lot, especially the caliber of player that Chase is,” Manuel said. “We’re going to get better when Chase gets back.”
With the offense struggling, Phillies officials were also keeping an eye on top prospect Domonic Brown, who had recovered from a broken hand and was now heating up at Triple-A. Manuel was eager to insert Brown’s bat into the lineup, but he was willing to be patient. He didn’t want a player who wasn’t ready to contribute, and neither did the pitchers who were starving for consistent run support.
“Go ask Halladay and Lee and them,” Manuel said. “We’re here to win. I’m not here to babysit. When Domonic’s ready to tear the cover off the ball, he’ll come.”
That was the idea, at least.
But in baseball, everything is subject to change.
Especially when the offense stinks.
After Miami, scoring runs continued to be a problem in Atlanta and St. Louis. The two games in St. Louis, both losses, were brutal. The Phils scored a total of two runs in starts by Lee and Oswalt, who had returned from the disabled list and held one of the best-hitting clubs in the league to a run over five innings.
After the second loss, players dressed quietly in the clubhouse and boarded buses to Lambert-St. Louis International Airport for the flight home. Players usually ride the second bus while coaches, staffers, and other members of the traveling party ride the first bus. As radio broadcaster Scott Franzke was about to get off the first bus and walk to the plane, he heard a pounding and shouting at the back of the empty coach. He walked down the aisle and opened the lavatory door. Veteran broadcaster Chris Wheeler, red-faced and frazzled, emerged holding a broken doorknob.
Wheeler’s pleas to be liberated from the locked lavatory seemed to be a fitting metaphor for a shackled Phillies’ offense. But freeing the bats wouldn’t be as easy as springing a locked bathroom door. That’s why management decided to do something bold. After weeks of stressing patience with Brown, the organization brought him up on May 20. The decision to promote the 23-year-old outfielder was made an hour after that helicopter-crash loss to Colorado on May 19. Moments after that game, Amaro announced that Shane Victorino was headed to the DL with a hamstring strain. At the time, Amaro essentially ruled out bringing up Brown to replace Victorino.
“We don’t think he’s ready,” Amaro said during a news conference.
Almost as soon as he spoke those words, Amaro began to reconsider. While it was true that he believed Brown needed more minor-league seasoning, he wondered if Brown might be able to contribute while continuing his development in Philadelphia. After emerging from the news conference, Amaro huddled with his assistant, Scott Proefrock, the man whose tireless behind-the-scenes work made the Cliff Lee dream a reality. Together, Amaro and Proefrock decided that maybe this was a good time to bring up Brown. The young outfielder would be coming to replace an injured player, not to be a savior for a sputtering offense. That would reduce pressure on the kid, they believed. Amaro and Proefrock floated their reasoning by Club President David Montgomery, who got on board with it. Four floors below, Manuel was still in his office unwinding after the loss. Amaro popped in and ran the plan by Manuel, who, just a week or so after saying he didn’t want to see Brown until he was ready to tear the cover off the ball, was all for adding a bat to his lineup, even one that wasn’t quite big-league ready.
A few days later, on May 23, the Phils added another bat when Utley returned to the lineup after missing 47 games. Utley was everybody’s favorite Phillie long before Lee came to town and took a piece of that mantle. Another sellout crowd greeted Utley with a thunderous ovation.
“I tried to tune it out, but it was a little too loud,” the second baseman said. Utley did not get a hit that night, but his presence seemed to inspire the Phillies. Every other starter did get a hit and the team beat Cincinnati, 10-3.
“There was a new energy with him in there,” Hamels said of Utley.
Hamels was the team’s best and most consistent pitcher in May. He began the month with a complete-game five-hitter against Washington and ended it with 10 strikeouts over seven innings of two-run, walk-free ball against the Mets. For the month, he went 4-1 with a 2.93 ERA in six starts and the club went 5-1 in those games. He was well on the way to the All-Star Game and Cy Young candidacy. He picked up his sixth win of the season the night that Utley returned for that 10-run explosion against Cincinnati and he was glad to have the run support, though he admitted that the lack of it in previous weeks had helped to harden The Rotation.
Showing a healthy arrogance, Hamels said, “We have the confidence that we know we can go out and pitch seven to nine innings and give up zero runs to maybe one or two. I think we just have the confidence we can shut an opposing team down no matter what we do as an offense.”
With Utley back, the Phi
ls took three of four from Cincinnati and moved on to New York, where Brown came off the bench and had two big hits to rally the team to a 6-4 win over the Mets on May 27. Three days later, the Phils were in Washington for a holiday matinee with the Nationals. The month had started with a profound sense of patriotism when President Obama announced the killing of terrorist Osama bin Laden late at night on May 1. The Phillies were playing the Mets at Citizens Bank Park when the news broke. In the stands, fans read reports on their cell phones. The game began to feel secondary in importance and before long, chants of “USA! USA! USA!” filled the air. It felt a little like Lake Placid in 1980.
“I don’t like to give Philly fans too much credit,” Mets third baseman David Wright said with a wry smile after the game, “but they got this one right.”
Four weeks later, the Phils were playing against a patriotic backdrop once again with Halladay on the mound in the nation’s capital on Memorial Day. It was a searing 92 degrees for the 1 P.M. start. By the middle innings, it was 95 and the heat index was 99. Sweat poured off Halladay as he worked under the broiling sun. Desperately trying to stay hydrated, he drank water and Pedialyte between innings. In the top of the fifth inning, he raced up the stairs behind the dugout and into the clubhouse where he changed his entire sweat-drenched uniform, right down to the socks, and made it back to the mound in a fresh uniform in time for the bottom of the inning. Halladay said the game was one of the most arduous he’d ever pitched. He trailed 4-3 after giving up a solo homer in the bottom of the sixth, but his teammates rallied for two in the top of the seventh—after a month of little run support, the boys with the bats owed their ace one—to take the lead. Halladay allowed a double and a single to open the bottom of the seventh inning, but survived the turbulence, and, on his 111 th pitch, blew a high fastball by former teammate Jayson Werth to end the inning. Antonio Bastardo, Jose Contreras, and Ryan Madson closed out the win.
“I was fortunate that the offense picked me up,” Halladay, his face beet-red after pitching under the hot sun, said after the game. “It was a grind out there. The strikeout [on Werth] was a nice way to end it, for sure.”
Things took a downward turn 24 hours later when the Nationals, led by Espinosa’s two home runs, laid a 10-2 whooping on Lee on the final day of the month.
And so May ended on a sour note.
But, hey, the Phils were still 13 games over .500 and two games up in the division.
That was nothing to belch at.
JUNE
The numbers lied to Roy Oswalt, so he lied to himself.
He had a 1.50 ERA in three starts since rejoining the roster on May 17, following a trip home to help his family recover from tornadoes in Mississippi and a trip to the disabled list to treat his ailing back. The pain in his back bit him every time he threw a pitch, but as long as he had that stellar ERA, he figured he could fight through it.
Oswalt looked like a new man when he joined the Phillies in July 2010. He had escaped the Houston Astros, then freefalling to the bottom of Major League Baseball’s standings, for a chance to win his first World Series. The change rejuvenated him. He went 7-1 with a 1.74 ERA in 13 games, out-pitching Roy Halladay and Cole Hamels down the stretch. He had the fourth-best ERA in baseball in that span. He endeared himself to Phillies fans when he played left field in a 16-inning loss to the Astros on August 24 at Citizens Bank Park. (He caught the only ball hit to him, bringing a grin to his face.) He volunteered to pitch in relief in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series against the San Francisco Giants. (He took the loss.)
But just weeks into the 2011 season his back had betrayed him and he looked miserable, like he wanted to be anywhere but at the ballpark. Oswalt had back problems before. An MRI exam from his time in Houston had revealed two degenerative discs, which had required trips to the disabled list and cortisone injections. In the past, the injections worked. But Oswalt received a shot on April 28 in Houston, two days after he surrendered five runs in three innings against the Arizona Diamondbacks in Phoenix, and it did nothing.
Did he really want to pitch in pain the rest of the season?
His fastball averaged 92.3 mph from his first start with the Phillies in July 2010 through April 15, 2011, when he injured his back against the Marlins. It had been 90.8 mph since. Oswalt downplayed the lack of pop of his once-exploding fastball. He told reporters in May, upon returning from the DL, it would take time to get his velocity back. But deep down, he knew better. That late life would never return to his fastball while his back throbbed; and without that late movement and separation in velocity from his other pitches, hitters would have a much easier time against him.
He allowed six hits, two runs, two walks, and one home run while striking out three in five innings in a 2-1 loss to the Nationals on June 1 at Nationals Park. It wasn’t a bad performance, but he clearly wasn’t the guy that dominated the National League in 2010. He wasn’t attacking hitters. His back wouldn’t let him. Still, despite opponents hitting .316 against him in his first four starts back and Oswalt striking out 45 percent fewer batters than he had the previous season, he was giving the Phillies a chance to win.
So he kept quiet.
“I’m fine,” he replied coolly anytime somebody asked him about his health.
Oswalt’s body language betrayed those words. Folks inside and outside the organization could see he was not OK. He looked miserable, as if something heavy weighed on his mind. He nearly lost his mother in a tornado the previous spring and the most recent storms in Mississippi had rattled his young children. And now he had a bad back. People inside and outside the Phillies organization wondered if the pitcher’s concerns for his family’s welfare, coupled with his ailing back, had sapped his desire to play baseball.
“Baseball is a gift you’ve been given to play, but this comes third or fourth on my list,” Oswalt said after returning from Mississippi on May 5. “I can walk away from the game and be happy as long as you have your family. They’re going to be there a lot longer than this game will be. A lot of people don’t look at it that way. A lot of people think this is who you are as the game goes. Baseball doesn’t mean more than my family, for sure.”
One rival executive became convinced Oswalt would not finish the season. He wasn’t the only one. Oswalt had talked openly about retirement before and after he joined the Phillies. He had indicated his current contract, which expired following the season—unless a 2012 mutual option worth $16 million was picked up—could be his last.
“I heard it,” Oswalt said. “People were asking me if I wanted to finish.”
He could have quit. He had been playing baseball since he was four years old. He was 33. He had a wife and kids and enough money to take care of his great-great-grandchildren. He could walk away and people would remember him as one of the best pitchers of his era. Nobody would question that. But Oswalt still felt a pull toward the mound.
He felt he owed the game a better finish.
Oswalt’s setback in Washington gave the Phillies back-to-back losses for just the fourth time in 2011, but they opened a three-game series in Pittsburgh feeling fine because they had their projected Opening Day lineup on the field for the first time since Game 6 of the 2010 NLCS.
Chase Utley had returned from his knee injury on May 23 and Shane Victorino had been activated from the disabled list on June 3 after missing three weeks because of a strained hamstring. The Phillies had the gang back together—Carlos Ruiz, Ryan Howard, Utley, Placido Polanco, Jimmy Rollins, Raul Ibanez, Victorino, and Domonic Brown—and they hoped it translated into runs. They needed some. The Phillies were averaging a measly 4.07 runs per game, which ranked 10th in the National League. The front office had been telling Charlie Manuel to relax, reminding him scoring was down everywhere in baseball. And they were right. Scoring was down everywhere in baseball. But Manuel didn’t give a crap about what the rest of the league was hitting. He cared how the Phillies were hitting, and they were wasting too many great performances from their rota
tion.
A full lineup hardly helped as the Pirates beat the Phillies, 2-1, in 12 innings in the series opener. After the game, Manuel vacillated between frustration and resignation as he talked about the offense, which squandered another fine effort from Cole Hamels, who allowed just one hit and one run in eight innings.
“We can get started anytime they want to, that’s how I look at it,” Manuel huffed after the game.
Rollins fouled a ball off his right knee the next night and left the game after a few innings in a 6-3 loss to the Pirates. He would not be in the starting lineup for another five games, giving the everyday lineup less than two full games together. It was the second time this season the Phillies had lost four consecutive games.
Roy Halladay snapped the losing streak with a 7-3 victory over the Pirates on June 5. Cliff Lee made his first start of the month the next night against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Citizens Bank Park, opening a season-high 11-game home stand. Lee entered June just 4-5 with a 3.94 ERA, which had not been the beginning everybody imagined when he slipped on his Phillies jersey during his re-introductory news conference in December. Some fans wondered if something was wrong with him, when in reality he had two awful starts that skewed his numbers. Erase a poor start in Atlanta on April 8 (six earned runs in 3⅓ innings) and a poor start in Washington on May 31 (six earned runs in 5⅓ innings) and Lee was 4-3 with a 2.90 ERA.
Not so bad.
Lee struck out 10 in seven scoreless innings in a 3-1 victory over the Dodgers. He entered the season with nine double-digit strikeout games in his career, but already had picked up his sixth in 2011. Lee, who was leading baseball with 100 strikeouts, couldn’t explain why he was striking out so many more hitters than in the past. He didn’t care to know. He just wanted to get on and off the mound as quickly as possible.
That wouldn’t be a problem the rest of the month. Nobody knew it at the time, but it was the beginning of the best month of Lee’s career and one of the best months for any pitcher in baseball history. The $120-million man was giving the Phillies their money’s worth.
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